The Pomp Podcast - Is the Fed About to Trigger the Next Bitcoin Boom? | Anthony & John Pompliano

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Anthony and John Pompliano dig into what’s really at stake at the upcoming Federal Reserve meeting — whether the move should be 25 bps, 50 bps, or nothing at all. We break down how those decisions ripple through markets and why bitcoin’s unique monetary policy is becoming impossible for the world to ignore. Plus, we break down the shift as bitcoin miners move into AI infrastructure — why it’s happening, how they’re doing it, and what it means for investors. ======================Bitizenship gives Bitcoin-forward investors a fast, compliant path to EU residency. Our Bitcoin Dolce Visa lets you invest in a 100% Bitcoin-aligned startup and qualify for Italy’s Golden Visa with one strategy. Claim your free strategy call at ⁠https://www.bitizenship.com/pomp.⁠======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.======================DeFi Development Corp. (Nasdaq: DFDV) is pioneering a new category in crypto investing with the first Solana-focused Digital Asset Treasury. DFDV offers public market exposure to Solana’s growth, yield, and onchain innovation, offering investors a leveraged way to participate in a trillion-dollar opportunity. Learn more about why Solana and why DFDV at SolanaTo10K.com.======================Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro1:33 – Fed rate cut debate (25 vs 50 vs 0 bps)13:20 – Bitcoin’s monetary policy vs the Fed’s reactive model18:40 – The future of economic data21:14 – QE returning & its impact on asset prices29:15 – Bitcoin miners pivoting into AI?

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano many of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them

for hours while i ask questions in an effort to learn so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform watch episodes on youtube and tell your friends and family about the podcast my goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. What's going

on, guys. Today in this conversation with John Pompliano, we talk about what's going to happen at the Federal Reserve meeting tomorrow. Is it going to be 25 basis points? Should it be 50 or should it be zero? We're going to dig into all that. We also talk about what's going on with Bitcoin's price and how Bitcoin's monetary policy is very unique and is creating a lot of change in the world that people are just now starting to understand. And then lastly, we talk about all the Bitcoin miners and how they're transitioning into AI infrastructure providers and why they're doing it, how they're doing it, and what is one of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my investing career almost a decade ago now and why I'm cool with it and how that thing really taught me so

much about investing. All that and more in this conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what's the first topic? FOMC meeting this week. 25 bips, 50 bips, zero bips. What do we get? Are we getting a cut? Well, first, let's go to the tape. We can look at the prediction markets. Polymarket has 25 basis points at 95%. Clear winner. The market thinks 25 basis points. If you look at no change, it's actually at 5%, and then a 50 basis point cut is less than 1%. So people obviously think it's going to be a 25 basis point cut, and they're more likely that there's going to be no cut than there would be a 50 basis point cut. Now, why is that all important? I think that there are three main things that warrant a much more aggressive cut than maybe people are expecting.

I do not believe they're going to do a 50 basis point cut, but I want to lay out the argument for a 50 basis point cut. The first thing is that the labor market has been weakening. We know that there are layoffs. We are now seeing layoffs that level as high as we saw back in 2020 during the pandemic. So over the last five or six years, this is the worst that the layoff numbers have been since 2020. If we go and we look at the hiring numbers, like net new hiring, This is the worst that it's been since the global financial crisis

at the end of that in 2010. So we know that those two things, lots of layoffs, not a lot of hiring, that's not good. On top of that, there's a lot of speculation about AI and all this stuff. It's just that companies are becoming more efficient and they're becoming more productive and so they need less employees,

but also you're starting to see entry-level jobs. Those people are not necessarily in it. They don't have a lot of experience. They don't have a lot of skills. So that's kind of the first thing that gets picked off by AI is AI can replace somebody who's not a lot of experience, not a lot of skills, duh. So I think the labor market weakening is kind of a really, really big point. Now, we know that somebody like Stephen Myron, he is very focused on the weak labor market and being able to cut

rates 50 basis points, he think can kind of get ahead of that. Because the problem with a weak labor market is not just the numbers you're seeing now, it is the trend and it's getting worse, It's degrading over time. If it's going to get worse, then the way you stop that and potentially reverse it is you get ahead. You're more aggressive and you try to stem the bleeding, right? It's kind of like if there's a car crash, right? And you come up and there's a victim on the floor and they're bleeding. Rule number one, check that they're breathing. Rule number two, stop the bleeding. Everything else comes after. Make sure they're breathing and stop the bleeding. Those two things. Well, we know the U.S. economy is breathing, right? We pulse check it. Like stock

market is doing just fine. So now we've got to stop the bleeding. Well, where's the bleeding happening? The bleeding is happening in things like the job market. And so that's really, really important for us to be able to kind of address. Now, the second thing that I think is really important here is that we know that there is inflation measured by the government. Core PCE inflation is at 3%. We know that there is things like the CPI around 3%. Trueflation is showing closer to like 2.4, 2.5%. So when you look at those numbers, you say to yourself, well, if the government number of inflation is at 3% and the target is 2%, we have high inflation. It's 50% higher, 1%, 100 basis points higher than the target. Okay. Well, first of all, the real-time

alternative metrics are lower. But second of all is that there is huge deflationary aspects to these inflation numbers. So it's not just about the headline number, but it's also about the inputs to it. Now, what are some of those inputs? Housing costs are going down. Narrative violation. Homes are actually becoming less expensive, not more expensive. Now, it's not enough. It's not happening fast enough for it to really be felt by people. But if you look at month over month and quarter over quarter, housing prices have been going down slightly. So it's not enough, but it has been going down. That is a deflationary component to it. The second thing is gas prices. So gas prices have been coming down.

It is estimated that we are going to get about a 3% reduction, that's about 11 cents or so, in the actual price of gasoline between 2024 and 2025. That's a reduction. Well, what happens when you reduce the cost of gasoline? Right now, it's estimated that the average family is gonna save 150 bucks a year on fuel. Any business that is reliant on gasoline as an input cost,

guess what? They're going to get lower input costs into their business, which makes them more profitable, should drive growth, et cetera. So there's disinflationary type of forces at play in those inflation numbers. What does that do? That opens up the opportunity for the Fed to be more aggressive in terms of rate cuts. And so if you look at those two things, you've got a weakening labor market and you've got an inflation formula of inflation mixture that has a lot of room for them to cut rates without worrying about sky high inflation or any sort of like runaway inflation.

So those two things kind of set the framework. The third thing, I mentioned there was three things. The third thing, there is a lot of dissent within the Federal Reserve. It is no longer taboo to say I disagree. In 35 years, we have not seen what we're seeing right now, which is the following. We have people who are saying,

okay, the market's telling us 25 basis points. We have some people who are dissenting to more aggressive interest rate cut. Stephen Byron. He wants 50 basis points. We've also seen the John Williams, the Mary Daly's, et cetera, right? New York and San Francisco Fed presidents. They're saying, hey, I'm more on the looser monetary policy side. Okay. But we also have people who are dissenting towards more hawkish monetary policy. They're saying, wait a second, I'm not cool with 50. I'm not cool with 25. I actually want to leave interest rates or raise them. So what this is called is this called

divergent dissent. Divergent dissent. You're going to start hearing a lot about this. Divergent dissent means that you have people who are dissenting more aggressive and people who are dissenting in a more hawkish way. That type of dissent within the Federal Reserve has not happened in 35 years. Now, why is that important? When you got a jump ball in basketball, when everyone's rolling around on the ground and they're all trying to grab it and the referee goes, jump ball guess what is anybody's ball who's going who's going to win the jump ball that's kind of like what's going on right now who's going to win the debate right there there's uncertainty that the tectonic plates of the fomc are shifting so where are we going to end up are

we going to end up with 25 basis point cut i do believe that's where we end up but i think we should get 50 the economy can handle it it needs it right i think that the market needs it i think that there are a lot of things in the labor market and in the inflation numbers that warrant the 50 basis point cut, but I do think they're only going to do 25. But when there's a jump ball or those tectonic plates are shifting, that means that things change. You need to have uncertainty. You need to have dissent. You need to have debate and argument, and it's spilling out into the public. When you have that, that provides the environment for things to change. And so how does it change? When does it change? Why does it change? We'll throw in the fact that we're going

to get a new Fed president. A lot of things moving around here. And I think that's ultimately what people are trying to figure out is how exactly are we going to end up with an environment from the central bank that is conducive to this economic boom? And, you know, I recently talked about, I wrote a piece about Elon Musk gave a podcast interview and he talked about the fact that there is likely to be a deflationary aspect to the U.S. economy via AI and robotics. And his whole point was basically there's supply and demand. When you have too much of one,

you either get inflation or deflation. And right now, because the money supply is growing so fast, we've had significant inflation. But if all of a sudden you enter into what I'm calling exponential productivity, Those two words are going to be very important for the next couple of years. Exponential productivity. What do I mean by that?

Artificial intelligence, software, can now write its own software. So now you aren't limited by the number of people that work. You can simply put AI to work to write more software. Exponential. Robotics. Humanoid robots are going to start manufacturing and assembling more humanoid robots. So when you have a facility where you say, we don't even have a human working on the floor,

it's just humanoids doing this. Exponential. So exponential productivity is going to significantly hit the US economy. And that is a very big deflationary force. Elon's perspective, within three years, he believes that force will actually overwhelm the rising money supply.

Now, he's not known for having the most accurate timelines. He's very aggressive in his timelines, but guy gets things done. He's an incredible, probably the best entrepreneur of our lifetime, right? I definitely believe that. So let's say that he is wrong by half. It's not three years, it's six. Okay, so in six years, we're going to get hit with deflation.

Well, we should probably start preparing for that now, right? We should probably understand where the world is headed. We should probably get rates down and not leave them at 3.75% to 4%. That's pretty high. somewhere in the like two and a half to three range is probably more conducive to the world that we're headed towards. Well, guess what?

A 50 basis point cut would get us there closer and faster. And so that's where I think that we should be. But if you said to me, gun to my head, I think that the prediction markets are right. I think that all the kind of market implications, the bonds, all that stuff is pointing to 25 basis points for a reason. I think we get the 25 basis points.

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That's bitcoinira.com slash pomp to upgrade your retirement today. The new Fed president will be important, obviously, to determine the policy moving forward. My question to you is, how long does it take these inputs to work through the economy? So you talk about gas prices, right?

You talk about, oh, the average family, $150 a year. That's nothing to the average family. That is not going to make a dent in their budget. It might for businesses, though, which ultimately will bring down the cost for the consumers. How long will it take to recognize that? And like, is the Fed basically always going to be behind the curve and they're always playing catch up? Or is this more of, hey, they can get in front of it by doing a 50 points basis cut, in your opinion? Well, so this is where I think something like Bitcoin's monetary policy becomes kind of a good counterexample.

So the way that traditional Federal Reserve monetary policy works is very reactive to the world. So global financial crisis happens. Ah, we got to go do something, right? If all of a sudden we have inflation is surging, asset prices are at the sky in 2021, ah, we should do something, let's raise rates. So it's very reactive to the world and that's why we get this human intervention

and we get the change. And there's a really, really good argument, I think, that actually the human intervention for monetary policy in the setting of the interest rate has created more boom and bust cycles than we otherwise would have. There's a fantastic book by Edward Chancellor. It's called The Price of Time.

I highly recommend to anyone to go read that. It really talks about the history of interest and setting interest rates and all this kind of stuff. Sounds boring. He's a fantastic writer. Excellent kind of historical view of how we got to where we are today. On top of that, there's a second book,

actually, Lords of Easy Money, that talks about the sole dissenter during the global financial crisis, who I think dissented eight times as they were going through the whole, like, let's print money. And he basically called exactly what ended up happening. And in hindsight, it looks like a genius, but he was kind of mocked at the time.

So when you see that reactive monetary policy, what you're doing is you're looking at data. So by nature, if you're consuming the data and then making a decision, you got to be reactive. You're reacting to the data, right? So you look at the data, you set the monetary policy based on whatever that data tells you. Well, what's the data? The data isn't about the future. The data is about the past. So if you're constantly looking at data from last month or last three months, then naturally

you have to be behind the curve because you're making decisions based on previous data. Well, that previous data, what the Fed is challenged with doing is look at past data to make a decision today with imperfect information and predict how that is going to impact us in the future. Nearly impossible, but it's very reactive by nature because of the structure and the thing they've been tasked with. Now, compare that to Bitcoin, right? Now, Bitcoin's monetary policy is set in stone, right? It is something that is going to continue to execute as code. It was set in the early days of Bitcoin, and anyone can audit it, anyone can go check it, but it does not react to the world. We get 21 million Bitcoin, regardless of whether we're

in bull markets or bear markets, regardless of whether the United States is winning or somebody else is winning, regardless of what any currency, interest rate, stock market, et cetera, is doing anywhere in the world. On top of that, we get a certain amount, depending on the halving cycle of Bitcoin that is going to come into the market with every single block, every 10 minutes, right? Every day, all this stuff. So that supply schedule does not react. The monetary policy schedule does not react and the finite supply does not react. And so the fact that Bitcoin acts in that way, the world now has to react to Bitcoin. So there's two different ways. There's always reaction. There's action and reaction. In the traditional system, the world acts and the

central bank reacts. In the Bitcoin system, Bitcoin acts and the world reacts. And so I think that those two systems are proving to do two different things. Bitcoin has been an incredible store of value because it's not changing regardless of what happens in the world. And so the fact that it's got a finite supply and it's able to have this software-driven monetary policy, you end up getting a really, really big impact in the world, as we've seen, go from zero to a couple trillion dollars where people store their economic value in this kind of system. The legacy system is reactive. So they always have to be behind the curve. But as we've talked about ad nauseum over the last couple of years, they're also making bad decisions because they are looking at previous

data that's inaccurate, right? People forget the CPI, the inflation metric, 40% of the CPI today is a guess. So out of every 10 data points they look at, four of them are made up. Now they'll say, oh, it's an educated guess. They'll say we have expertise in guessing. They'll say that we're triangulating the data, but you're guessing. You cannot factually prove that this is accurate. It's the best we have, they'll claim, but it's a guess. So four out of every 10 data points in the CPI data set is a guess. How could it possibly be accurate, right?

You're telling me that they didn't make a mistake on any of the data points? so if you have bad data going in and then the methodology you don't even get me started on that how screwed up that is of course we get bad decisions on the back end now again in their defense they'll say well it's the best that we have right in terms of the government data one of my uh predictions over the next 15 to 20 years in 15 to 20 years i know i'm hedging a little bit right but i do think at some point in the future uh we are going to see the finance industry shift from a world where it is solely focused on government-based data

to a world that is majority focused on real-time private alternative data sets. And people go, that's already happening to a degree, kind of. What I mean though is when somebody says, what's inflation? They answer with the government data. When somebody talks about jobs,

they talk about the government data, right? You may get somebody like really hardcore finance person, like ADP jobs or challenger layoff report or whatever. But for the most part, people point to the BLS data, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they say, this is what the CPI is. This is what the job data is, whatever. I think that that is going to shift because you're going to continue to get a destruction of trust in those organizations. And you have a rise of things like truflation, right? If you

look at truflation, truflation is more accurate than the CPI. And it's not just me saying that, right? There's a lot of people now on Wall Street that are realizing the real-time alternative inflation metric from truflation is better than the CPI. Why doesn't the government just buy true inflation well government's not really in the in the world of buying companies like that um or historically they haven't done stuff like that um now could they i would like to say otherwise well again i think there's a difference between if you're taking economic risk and getting paid you know commensurate amount for that risk now i'll be the first i don't like the fact that the government's doing it but both republican and democrat presidents have done it right there is

some degree of precedent where in times of crisis or national security or national strategic reasons we have done stuff like this now the question will be in hindsight on that specific point when and if we divest of these so in the global financial crisis in hindsight no one had a problem with it because they basically said hey look we extended economic value we took risk the american taxpayer got paid for it and the american taxpayer made money and eventually the government divested into those things and they no longer have ownership so when you kind of look at it holistically everyone's fine with at the time it was very controversial right but in hindsight everyone's like okay fine if the government holds you know intel stock forever and it was 10 of the company

i think that if you add that feels a little bit different right and so i think that's part of the question here is just like we we don't have all the information and so okay they took a position they're providing value what should we think about you know um well let's get all the information then we can decide whether it was a good uh idea or not i'm curious by your answer to this prompt of a question qt is ending what do you expect with qe well um i mean loose monetary policy leads to higher asset prices pretty simple right um it also leads to faster uh depreciation of the U.S. dollar. And so that devaluation or debasement of the U.S. dollar is likely going to continue. And I expect that over the next three to five years, asset prices are going to do very well

because we now have the tailwind of the federal government doing its thing. There's a lot of impact in different sectors. There's a lot of, you know, kind of inputs into the economic machine. You know, one of the things that people always look at with the economic machine is they simply say, okay, cheaper money is coming into the market. That means that all assets, all sectors now have a bid or a tailwind. Well, to a degree, theoretically, that's right. But you forget that there's also micro factors that can actually influence something much more than the macro factor, right? So let's say, for example, that Bitcoin, right? The second that BlackRock stepped in and said, we're doing the ETFs, that was a quote unquote micro factor. But that micro factor

outweighed any macro economic factor. People just, whoa, that's big, right? They discount the macro in that moment and they look at the micro. I think you see this in certain sectors in terms of housing. I think you're seeing this right now in innovation sectors. So why are, here's a great example. Why is Oklo going gangbusters? Well, Jensen went on a podcast with Joe Rogan and talked about small reactors. People know that energy is a crucial component of American security moving forward. They know it's a national priority. They tend to be a publicly traded American company that can provide that to somebody. And so I think a lot of times people forget every asset in the market is a tool that an investor can use to express a view.

And I think that when you start to look at assets that way, it helps you understand how capital flows. So as one example, when DraftKings went public, I believe they were the first one to go public, if I remember correctly. Now, if I'm an investor and I want to express the view that I believe that sports gambling is going to be bigger and more valuable in the future, historically, I didn't have a pure play way to express that view. So maybe I went and I bought, you know, whether it was MGM or, you know, some other company that kind of had a bunch of stuff going on and maybe one piece was involved in that business. Um, from that perspective, if you look and you say, okay, well now DraftKings is public. I can put this in my portfolio. It's a pure play exposure,

a pure play exposure to sports gambling. A lot of investors went and they did that, right? They were making a sector bet by expressing it in the only name that they could. If you look at AI right now, I think what's really interesting is there are companies like Tesla, like Google, where you can go and express a view, but they actually are convoluted with other things. So when you buy Tesla stock, you may be wanting to express the view of, I think, humanoid robots are going to be bigger in the future. But alongside that view, you're also taking a view on self-driving cars and on ai on the potential that he may combine tesla spacex and xai and if you like there's all these things that play into it google right now google ai is doing really well i use nano

banana great name uh it's great product right um but if i got by google stock i'm buying nano banana and gemini 3 and youtube and youtube and search and you know all these different things Now, some of them are interrelated, but some of them are very disparate. And so I just think that the more that I've spent time in the public markets, this idea of getting pure play exposure is important. I do believe that the first company that has an AI model that goes public is going to be very well received. I think that'd be pretty interesting. So we'll kind of see how that plays out. And the last thing I'll say is I do think that we are headed towards a world where with

QE, you then return risk-taking in a way that is a little bit harder during QT. And I think we already feel like there's risk-taking in the market. So I would expect people to push further out on the risk curve. I would expect debt to become a bigger and bigger topic because you've got lower interest rates, so the cost of capital is cheaper. And so you just got to remember as an investor, like rule number one is don't blow yourself up. Don't be the guy who is taking the most risk.

Don't be the guy who takes on the most debt. Don't be the guy who is doing the craziest thing. Instead, understand how the market is playing out. Think really, really long-term and navigate this, right? Understand, okay, rates are coming down. QE is back on. We know that there's this like innovation boom that's going on.

how can I allocate capital where there's a return that can be captured, but do so in a way that doesn't risk me potentially blowing myself up. And if you can find that sweet spot, I think that's really where outsized returns will kind of lie for the next decade or so. Makes sense. I do agree with your point that the micro factors matter, especially obviously sector by sector. But I think following the macro trends will be more important long term than, you know, small micro events look in 2022 right so you actually go back to november 21 that's when the fed started talking about we're going to raise rates market that was the top right market's forward looking market started to come down if you were paying attention to only micro factors during 2022 you got your

face ripped off because you were looking in like oh this that fundamental sentiment technical whatever and the fed was just like don't think we're going from rates at zero to five and we're gonna do it at the fastest pace in history don't fight the fed right now where that changes is actually it's easier to uh have something that is a tailwind or a structural advantage and then look at the micro factors so they're working in concert with each other right but like i wouldn't i don't know if i'd be the guy who's gonna go and short the s&p 500 when the government's turning on qe right could you pick up pennies in front of a steamroller absolutely there's people who do that all the time problem is that the friggin steamrollers coming right you don't get out of

the way you get squashed and so i just think that that's why you see a lot of uh people that there's less short sellers and single name stocks now right they kind of now are shorting baskets or indexes um it's just that the the risk reward has completely changed and i think that's what people are trying to uh to figure out today's episode is brought to you by defy development corp global wealth today exceeds 500 trillion dollars yet crypto still represents less than one percent of that total defy development corp nasdaq ticker dfdv offers investors a new way to gain exposure to one of the most disruptive technologies of our time crypto infrastructure as crypto and trad5 veterans the dfdv team is building the first solana focused public treasury they're

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visit dfdv.com slash POM. That's dfdv.com slash POM. 100%. All right. Wired Magazine put out an article talking about Bitcoin miners converting to AI. No brainer. Is this a worry for Bitcoin?

Look, I've talked about this for a very long time. Back in 2016, 2017, many people know that that's how I got started in crypto was mining. Um, and at the time, uh, in hindsight, uh, one of my, um, mistakes was that I believed something and I didn't chase it with higher conviction. So I'll give you, uh, kind of an insight into this. Um, in 2016, when I started mining Ethereum or Ether, uh, ETH was at something like five to eight dollars and at the time i was mining like five a day that don't sound so great when you're

mining 25 to 40 dollars you're like uh-oh it's gonna take me a long time to make all my money back and i was using gpus to do it now in 2017 ether's price went from like eight bucks to like 150 very quickly in the first half of the year. Now, all of a sudden, you were mining $150 a day times five or six or seven or four, you know, whatever, however many you were getting per day, a little bit more interesting. I'm gonna make my money back real fast.

And then it went to $300. And then by the end of 2017, it was at $1,400, right? So I did not hold till $1,400. I was an idiot and I sold way too early. But that type of explosive kind of price was all about converting energy into economic value. No different than Bitcoin mining, right? So I started with the ETH stuff just because it was GPU-based. And then I started to learn about Bitcoin mining and all that and started doing some Bitcoin mining, whatever.

Now, part of the thesis of starting with the GPUs was that a GPU was going to be able to be used not only for Ether mining, but also for self-driving cars for dna sequencing for 3d rendering for all these different kind of computational tasks and the belief at the time was you start with eth because it's the easiest you don't have to go get customers or do anything you just plug the machines in get the power bam you connect to the network you can start mining immediately but the idea was that in the future you're gonna be able to switch between these things and so i was very much into uh understand the GPU market. I even tweeted in 2017, the world runs on CPUs today. It will eventually run on GPUs. In hindsight, I should have taken every single dollar I had that was

not in Bitcoin and put it into Nvidia stock. Duh. I didn't do that. To put salt on the wound, somebody in the comments to that tweet said, that's why I hold Nvidia stock. And I responded like an arrogant idiotic prick and i said all the hardware manufacturers are going to get commoditized i deserve to have not gained every single dollar that i would have gained by buying nvidia stock because of that view i was wrong so i owned gpus i was mining i understood the GPUs are going to be used for all this stuff. But I still did not buy NVIDIA stock. So it's not woe is me. I did perfectly fine mining ETH at those prices. But the reason I say that is because it was very clear early on that people who were, quote unquote, in crypto understood there was

going to be other use cases for hardware. And that was GPUs and ETH and some of the things we're talking about. What now has happened is these Bitcoin miners who really got scale. Bitcoin mining is really the folks who got the scale um they now understand why i own land i own power i owned you know the equivalent of a data center i could switch out the hardware so look at somebody like an iron right those guys are infrastructure experts they have expertise long uh uh history of investing in you know infrastructure etc they said well why don't we just take out the bitcoin mining machines and put in the the gpus bam stock takes off companies way more valuable seems to be working. What you're seeing is people are ultimately, if you own power or you have access

to power, you simply want to understand what is the highest value I can get for this power. So it used to be Bitcoin mining. Now, because of the supply and demand imbalance, there's a lot of people say, well, actually it's not crypto or Bitcoin anymore. Now it's AI. Some companies will say, we're going to keep what we have and then everything new we build will be AI. Some rip out the Bitcoin miners and they put AI, right? If you look at somebody like a HUD 8, right? And American Bitcoin, pretty interesting. They took what they had there, right? Asher and his team, I mean, I've publicly wrote about, I was helping them at one point as an advisor. Like, I think that they are great at making deals. Well, guess what they did? I don't know, a couple of months ago,

they took all their Bitcoin operations. They put it into a spinout. They spun it out as American Bitcoin. They got Eric Trump and a bunch of other people there. They're now going and they're mining in Bitcoin. And then they're left with HUD-8. HUD-8's got exposure to that business because they own a bunch of stock, but also they're going and they're building high performance compute, you know, AI centric type data centers. So some are going to keep their operations, just spin it out into two different stocks. So that's what you're seeing is people are saying, how do we monetize energy and compute? Some are going to do it with Bitcoin. Some are going to do it with AI. I think that ultimately it's a supply demand question. And I think the Bitcoin

miners are going to do just fine. I think that the AI players are going to do just fine. And I think the hybrids that have Bitcoin and AI, they're going to do just fine as well. And so there's no one way up to kind of success of the mountain. The question is just, in a world where there's gold rush, how fast can you run? You know, one of the things that I'll leave everyone with this, if you made it this far in the conversation, here's a little alpha for you. One of my favorite quotes is from George Soros. And he says, when I see a bubble, I rush in and I push it higher. And what people I think forget is that these things end at some point. Bubbles do pop or correct or cool off, whatever kind of severity. But they usually are bigger and go on longer than

people realize. And really good investors understand that when a bubble is forming, there's asymmetric returns, there's a lot of volatility, and there's a lot of outperformance that can be gained by participating, which is very counter. Because when you hear bubble, most people say, I run. But many of the best investors in the world, they are more like the george soros mindset of when i see a bubble i rush in and i think that that's what you're seeing with a lot of these ai businesses is people are cashing checks man and if there's someone that's going to cash a check and you got infrastructure energy power land data center well that check have my name on it and so as long as the economic incentive is there you're going to continue

to see people do this 100 all right that's it all right thank you for doing it we'll talk next week